


we'll just take it like it comes

by notquitepunkrock



Category: One Day at a Time (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Homophobia, I promise, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Suicide Attempts, based on s2ep5, it ends happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 11:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19083808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notquitepunkrock/pseuds/notquitepunkrock
Summary: "We have teenagers in this house. We have a gay teenager in this house. We have a veteran with PTS in this house. This is the last house that should own a gun."s2ep05, Locked Down





	we'll just take it like it comes

**Author's Note:**

> a tiny vent fic, because i was rewatching this series and couldn't get this line out of my head.

_ “We have teenagers in this house.” _

Alex sat, shaking, on the floor of his bedroom. Schneider had been drinking. Alex had  _ caught _ Schneider drinking.

It had only been two years since his parents had split, so he still remembered the shouting while he and Elena were supposed to be asleep. 

He still remembered the time his dad woke him up when he was nine, whispering frantic goodbyes with his hands smoothing over his hair; he’d gone from Alex’s room to Elena’s, and if she hadn’t started yelling, hadn’t caused their mom to come rushing in, he’d be gone, and all Alex had done was sit there in fear. 

He remembered walking into his parents’ room, the day before his mom announced that his dad was leaving them, and seeing the hole in their wall, and his mom crying with her back to the door. He’d walked back out before she saw him, but the image was scarred into his head. 

When his dad walked out on Elena, had decided that his pride and messed up ideals were more important than Alex’s sister, Alex felt angrier than he ever had in his entire life. When he learned that Schneider had relapsed, his hands shook with anger and fear and he  _ hated _ it. When he learned his dad was trying, he leveled out, but sometimes it just wasn’t  _ enough, _ not when he knew how much Elena had been hurt.

And that anger, it just kept  _ building _ and  _ building _ and  _ building, _ and every day it got worse and worse, and there was no way for him to let it out. 

He stared at the bottle of his mother’s pills on the floor in front of him. He wanted to make it all - the fear, the anger, the hurt - stop. This was the only way he could.

The front door slammed closed, and he heard his sister yelling for him. He took one last look at the bottle of pills and shook his head. “Give me a second, I have to pee!” he yelled, and took them back to his mom’s room where they belonged before he went to the living room.

 

_ “We have a gay teenager in this house.” _

Elena flinched when people’s eyes turned her and Syd’s way. Her shoulders crept their way to her ears whenever she walked through the hallway, her hands twisted in the sleeves of her sweater or her school skirt, and her vision tunneled until she could safely sink into the back of her classes.

The nuns may have been willing to accept her, her family may be supportive, but the rest of school, of the city? So much less so. There was a reason she had no friends at school, and a reason that her family kept reminding her of it.

The sting of betrayal from being left alone on the dance floor in front of everyone crept up when she least expected it.

Elena was just grateful that they didn’t say things in front of Alex. She’s not sure she could take that. And so her anxiety was getting worse, the panic attacks were getting more frequent. And so she was losing weight out of fear, and stress, and pain.  She could take it, she was sure, if her dad hadn’t been one of them.

The words hurt, the whispers and glares behind her back stung. Every time her abuelita praised Alex and ignored her, Elena wished she could be better. Every time they clucked over  _ papito, _ her perfect, precious brother, she felt a little more broken. Every time she was forced to sit through an awkward dinner for the sake of her  _ father _ and her  _ brother, _ she felt a little more empty. But she was  _ handling _ it, and everything would be fine.

So fine that she was now staring at the pocket knife her dad had gotten her for her thirteenth birthday and wondering what would happen if she just ended it all right then. Her shaking hands reached for the knife, and she gripped it tightly between her fingers, already picturing the way that her ruby red blood would spill across her stupid  _ pale _ skin-

Abuelita called for her and Alex to come to dinner, and she let the knife fall to her bedspread.

 

_ “We have a veteran with PTS in this house.” _

Penelope was staring down the barrel of loaded gun. She wasn’t sure how she’d ended up here. 

The last thing that she remembered was the fireworks, which made her flinch harder than they usually did, and then being on the floor of her bedroom with her handgun in her lap. 

Normally, New Years’ was a flurry of emotion in the Alvarez house. But not this year. This year, her mami had gone to a special opera performance with Doctor B; this year Elena was at a party with Syd (and didn’t that just terrify Penelope,) and wouldn’t be back until morning; this year, Alex was with Schneider and the rest of the travel team. This year, Penelope was alone.

God, she shouldn’t be alone right now.

She’d told Alex she’d gotten rid of the gun.

She hadn’t gotten rid of the gun. And now it was going to be the death of her, just like she had feared when she found out about her mother’s. Her hands shook as she held onto it, the cold metal familiar beneath her palms.

The phone rang somewhere in the distance, but she just kept staring at the gun. There was a loud sound in the living room, Schneider’s voice yelling for her, and Alex yelling that he was  _ fine, _ thanks. Penelope’s concentration broke, and she shook herself. “Just a second!” she yelled, quickly emptying the gun of any ammo and returning in to the safe under the bed. 

In the morning she would get rid of the gun. For real this time.

 

_ “This is the last house that should have a gun.” _

 

Elena heard the click of pills in Alex’s hand as he walked down the hallway. She pretended she didn’t, but she watched him a little closer after that, stood with baited breath outside his room for just a second after he closed the door to make sure she didn’t hear the bottle rattle. If it happened again, if she thought it even for a second, she would tell her mom, she decided.

She didn’t hear it again, but her heart stilled in her chest every time he stormed off and didn’t come back for hours afterwards.

 

Syd found the knife in Elena’s bed the next night. She made some dumb excuse about using it to cut the stray strings off of her hoodie, and they didn’t believe her at all, but they accepted it for the moment. Later, they’d texted Alex with terrified, shaking fingers. Every time they saw her after that, they looked out for any signs that maybe they were missing something, something  _ big, _ something  _ important. _

Alex watched his sister for scars, but he never saw any. He swore to himself, if he ever saw anything, he would go straight to their mom. He kept an ear out at school, but never heard anything; then again, the other kids had a habit of quickly clamming up when he came close. Every time his Papi said something passive-aggressive, or angry, or just plain awful, Alex said something. 

His sister started smiling a little more, when she noticed, and that was all he could ask for.

 

Penelope told Schneider two days later. Schneider went with her to the police station to turn in the gun, and it took everything in her to not start sobbing as she stood in front of the desk. When they got into his car - not hers, she couldn’t drive like this - they sat in the parking lot for several long moments. 

Schneider kept a closer eye on her after that. Because Penelope had  _ told _ him that she would never do something like that, but then she’d shone up at his apartment and told him that if he had gotten to the apartment with Alex just a few minutes later, she wouldn’t be here right now. And the thought terrified him, made him feel cold as ice inside 

 

Penelope doubled down on the therapy,  started going to private sessions in addition to her group, changed medications a couple of times until she found something that worked better. And she started taking Alex and Elena to therapy, because she was worried, now, that she was missing something. It kept her up at night, worrying about it. 

Elena went on antidepressants, eventually. Alex didn’t, but when she offered to stop taking him to therapy, he asked her not to, and there really was a difference between him before therapy and him after.

Things were okay in the Alvarez house, slowly but surely. Schneider could see the difference in a way that no one else did, not even Lydia or Penelope, but he was knew the signs of spiralling in a way that they didn’t. When Elena smiled for multiple days in a row, without influence of Syd, he counted that as a win. When Alex’s hands didn’t clench into fists on a regular basis anymore, he counted that as a win. When Penelope’s anxiety attacks stopped happening everyday, Schneider counted that as a major win.

 

The Alvarez family was going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos make me happy xx


End file.
